Mervyn Peake’s calculating and ghoulish shape-shifter fascinates readers and drives the plot of the Gormenghast series
When the lonely Fuchsia Groan finds Steerpike in her attic, he tells her: “I come for sanctuary. I am a rebel. I am at your service as a dreamer and a man of action.” He has just clambered into her room after scaling the Gormenghast rooftops to escape imprisonment. He is certainly a man of action, but the chivalry is a guise. The only person he is out to serve is himself.
Steerpike, the anti-hero of Mervyn Peake’s Titus books, is a classic baddie. He is an ugly social climber who resembles a young Richard III; Peake tells us that “his body gave the appearance of being malformed, but it would be difficult to say exactly what gave it this gibbous quality”. Steerpike’s high shoulders, large forehead, and close-set red eyes are mentioned frequently. Over the course of Titus Groan and Gormenghast, he commits a string of murders that lead him to positions of ever greater influence within Gormenghast’s hierarchy. His pale, mask-like face is eerily inscrutable, the keynote of his evil. He constantly assumes new shapes in order to manipulate the elite, and could fit any number of villainous categories. Is he a malformed Machiavel, a cold-hearted psychopath or a false revolutionary?
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